The National Park Service has temporarily halted the dismantling of a fence that for decades has separated hundreds of tule elk from ranches and dairies in the Point Reyes National Seashore.
The agreement, reached last Friday at a hearing in federal court with lawyers representing a ranching association that sued over the fence, is the latest installment in a protracted battle between environmentalists and agricultural families whose presence on the peninsula predates its designation as a national park in 1962.
During a pithy, five-minute hearing, an attorney for the park service agreed that no further segments of the fence would come down while the ranchers’ motion for an injunction on the fence plan is pending.
“There is no plan to remove any other portion of the fence as we stand here today,” Assistant United States Attorney Michael Keough said.
U.S. District Court Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley approved of the pause as a “rational decision…given the situation.”
By the time she convened the hearing on Friday, more than 850 feet of fence—about the length of three football fields—had already been dismantled. That work started the day after the park service announced the final Tomales Point Area Plan, the first update to its tule elk management policies since 1998, last Monday.
Some 315 elk, once penned in a 2,600-acre preserve at the peninsula’s northern tip, are now free to stray beyond their historic bounds—though many had already found ways to do so.
The next hearing, on a request for a preliminary injunction made by the California Cattleman’s Association, is scheduled for Feb. 13. Until then, the elk will be free to come and go through the gap as they please.
“The park service’s approach to this was deliberately in the vein of asking for forgiveness instead of permission,” said San Francisco attorney Tony Francois, who filed the request last Tuesday on behalf of the association and its member ranches on the peninsula. The following day, he filed a request for a temporary restraining order, which was effectively granted by the park service’s agreement to stop dismantling the fence.
For years, activists who hope to see elk habitat restored to a more natural state have called on the park to remove the eight-foot-tall, woven-wire fence. They argue that increasingly frequent and prologued droughts have transformed it into a lethal boundary—driving mass starvation and dehydration among the captive elk. Their appeals appeared successful last Tuesday, when park crews began tearing down the fence.
The tule elk at Tomales Point have been kept behind the 2.2-mile-long enclosure since their reintroduction to the seashore in 1978, just as the species was on the brink of extinction. While officials later moved some elk to other parts of the park, where the animals were given free range, the Tomales Point herd remained captive to prevent their encroachment onto the park’s pastoral lands.
Ranchers and dairy operators who lease 18,000 acres inside the park have long argued that the elk damage their property and compete with their livestock for limited forage and water. On Friday, one of their attorneys, Peter Prows, requested that the park service restore the dismantled section of fence and return any elk that wander out of the former reserve.
The park service’s attorney countered that such a measure would be impossible to implement given that “elk exist on both sides of the fence” already. In addition to the two free-ranging herds, he said, park crews had observed “at least 88 elk from the Tomales Point herd that were already south of the existing fence before any action had been taken” to dismantle it.
Mr. Prows responded that the park service agreed in its 2021 general management plan to return any elk that strayed onto ranchlands.
“We’re just asking the park service to do what it had already decided to do,” he said. “The park service in 2021 didn’t perceive a practical difficulty in returning any elk from the Tomales Point area that managed to get into the pastoral zone back to the Tomales Point area. And we’re just asking that it stick with its decision.”
But Judge Corley demurred on that matter, noting that the cattleman association’s request for a restraining order addressed only the removal of the fence, not what to do with any escaped elk.
“It was technically successful,” seashore rancher Kevin Lunny said this week of the hearing. “But if there’s still a big gap in the fence, what’s it worth? It’s like drilling a hole in the bottom of a water tank and having the court say, ‘Well, you can’t drill another one.’ That first hole is going to drain the tank anyway.”
Last week, as elk ventured out of their former enclosure, wildlife photographer Matthew Polvorosa Kline, a San Geronimo resident who has logged nearly a thousand hours watching the ungulates roam the peninsula’s grassy expanses, arrived to capture footage of the first animals to cross through the newly opened gap.
That Wednesday, Mr. Kline stationed himself along Pierce Point Road, near where the park crew had paused from their work on the fence to eat lunch. Through his viewfinder, he watched a bull elk edging forward into unfamiliar territory. Zooming in, he captured the flare of the animal’s nostrils and the rustle of the wind through its tawny coat. The elk paused, turning back as if to consider what lay behind it, then pressed onward, lowering its muzzle to graze on fresh ground.
Watching the footage, which he later set against a gentle wash of piano chords and the floating voice of Ram Dass (“Though we’ve lived our life totally involved in the world, we know that we’re of the spirit”), one may find it hard to resist anthropomorphizing the elk.
“[After the elk] crossed that threshold where the fence was just a day before, I lost it,” he said. “I just was so emotional. I get emotional now, just watching the video. I think about how far I’ve come with these animals, and all the people who supported these elk along the way.”
Mr. Kline is soft-spoken and deliberate. Now in his 40s, he grew up in what he calls the “concrete flats” of the East Bay, where a rare wild turkey was the closest thing to exotic wildlife. As a child, he studied maps and dreamed of venturing farther afield; as an adult, he spends long stretches in the bed of his pickup, camera primed, scanning the grasslands in hopes of capturing not only an image of an elk, but also the animal’s very essence.
For the past five years, he has gone from detached chronicler into something of an activist—though that term sits uneasily with him. “I consider myself an environmentalist and a wildlife cameraman,” he said. “This elk-tivist thing…it feels kind of strange.”
He insists he’s not angling for soundbites; he wants to get the facts straight.
“Some people come out here and say it’s a prison, it’s horrible, it’s deathly,” he said. “I look at it a little bit differently. I see it as an oasis that’s trying to return, but it’s hindered because the elk are hindered.”
A turning point came in August 2020, while he was hiking the Tomales Point Trail. Camera in hand, he first stumbled upon a chewed-up elk carcass, and then a dead bull, its antlers snared in the fence’s mesh wiring. Another dead elk was trapped in a stock pond, submerged up to its neck, flies swarming its open eyes. With anguish, Mr. Kline recalls seeing other decaying bodies and dismembered remains.
“After 23 or 25 elk, I lost track of how many I’d come across,” he said. “I had to stop coming out here, at least temporarily. My son was born, and there was so much sadness, so much depression here. I didn’t want to bring that home.”
His photographs of dead elk eventually aired on ABC News and were disseminated by environmental groups to provide visual testimony of the situation. At the time, he said, the park service downplayed the die-off and accused him of misleading the public.
On a visit to the reserve on Monday, Mr. Kline drove up to the opening in the fence just as a small group of elk strolled over a nearby knoll. He trained his lens on their striding bodies, quietly predicting their next move. “My guess is they’ll follow the female,” he said.
Sure enough, one by one, they filed across the road and veered westward, away from the gap and toward the ocean.
“There are moments,” he said, gesturing to the surrounding grasslands, “when it’s paradise. The fog drifts in and you’re alone with a giant bull elk with these huge antlers just feet away. You have this magnificent animal that’s powerful and majestic and its mane is blowing in the wind.”
But a deeper look unsettles that idyll. “Like so many places,” he said, “once you look closer, you start seeing that it’s like a fractured mosaic out here.”